What reasons did the prophet give for why the Lord ended the practice of plural marriage—and what does that decision help you understand about how God guides His work?
"Excerpts from Three Addresses by
President Wilford Woodruff
Regarding the Manifesto
The Lord will never permit me or any other man who stands as President of this Church to lead you astray. It is not in the programme. It is not in the mind of God. If I were to attempt that, the Lord would remove me out of my place, and so He will any other man who attempts to lead the children of men astray from the oracles of God and from their duty. (Sixty-first Semiannual General Conference of the Church, Monday, October 6, 1890, Salt Lake City, Utah. Reported in Deseret Evening News, October 11, 1890, p. 2.)
It matters not who lives or who dies, or who is called to lead this Church, they have got to lead it by the inspiration of Almighty God. If they do not do it that way, they cannot do it at all. …
I have had some revelations of late, and very important ones to me, and I will tell you what the Lord has said to me. Let me bring your minds to what is termed the manifesto. …
The Lord has told me to ask the Latter-day Saints a question, and He also told me that if they would listen to what I said to them and answer the question put to them, by the Spirit and power of God, they would all answer alike, and they would all believe alike with regard to this matter.
The question is this: Which is the wisest course for the Latter-day Saints to pursue—to continue to attempt to practice plural marriage, with the laws of the nation against it and the opposition of sixty millions of people, and at the cost of the confiscation and loss of all the Temples, and the stopping of all the ordinances therein, both for the living and the dead, and the imprisonment of the First Presidency and Twelve and the heads of families in the Church, and the confiscation of personal property of the people (all of which of themselves would stop the practice); or, after doing and suffering what we have through our adherence to this principle to cease the practice and submit to the law, and through doing so leave the Prophets, Apostles and fathers at home, so that they can instruct the people and attend to the duties of the Church, and also leave the Temples in the hands of the Saints, so that they can attend to the ordinances of the Gospel, both for the living and the dead?
The Lord showed me by vision and revelation exactly what would take place if we did not stop this practice. If we had not stopped it, you would have had no use for … any of the men in this temple at Logan; for all ordinances would be stopped throughout the land of Zion. Confusion would reign throughout Israel, and many men would be made prisoners. This trouble would have come upon the whole Church, and we should have been compelled to stop the practice. Now, the question is, whether it should be stopped in this manner, or in the way the Lord has manifested to us, and leave our Prophets and Apostles and fathers free men, and the temples in the hands of the people, so that the dead may be redeemed. A large number has already been delivered from the prison house in the spirit world by this people, and shall the work go on or stop? This is the question I lay before the Latter-day Saints. You have to judge for yourselves. I want you to answer it for yourselves. I shall not answer it; but I say to you that that is exactly the condition we as a people would have been in had we not taken the course we have.
… I saw exactly what would come to pass if there was not something done. I have had this spirit upon me for a long time. But I want to say this: I should have let all the temples go out of our hands; I should have gone to prison myself, and let every other man go there, had not the God of heaven commanded me to do what I did do; and when the hour came that I was commanded to do that, it was all clear to me. I went before the Lord, and I wrote what the Lord told me to write. …
I leave this with you, for you to contemplate and consider. The Lord is at work with us. (Cache Stake Conference, Logan, Utah, Sunday, November 1, 1891. Reported in Deseret Weekly, November 14, 1891.)
Now I will tell you what was manifested to me and what the Son of God performed in this thing. … All these things would have come to pass, as God Almighty lives, had not that Manifesto been given. Therefore, the Son of God felt disposed to have that thing presented to the Church and to the world for purposes in his own mind. The Lord had decreed the establishment of Zion. He had decreed the finishing of this temple. He had decreed that the salvation of the living and the dead should be given in these valleys of the mountains. And Almighty God decreed that the Devil should not thwart it. If you can understand that, that is a key to it. (From a discourse at the sixth session of the dedication of the Salt Lake Temple, April 1893. Typescript of Dedicatory Services, Archives, Church Historical Department, Salt Lake City, Utah.)" (“Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff regarding the Manifesto” (at the end of Official Declaration 1)
"One crisp fall morning, Monday the sixth of October 1890, seven thousand Latter-day Saints sat in silence on the long wooden benches in the large oval tabernacle on Temple Square. The event was the semiannual general conference of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the assembly had come to listen to instruction from men who they revered as prophets, seers, and revelators.
At that time, conference speakers were not informed in advance when they would speak. The President of the Church made assignments in the moment as he felt impressed. No one prepared talks beforehand. Several of the speakers came to the conference with a brief outline tucked into their scriptures, but many others came with no notes at all, counting on the Holy Spirit to fill their minds when they heard the prophet call their name.
As the crowd awaited the session’s first address, President Wilford Woodruff turned to his right, looked at the man seated next to him, and asked him to stand and address the audience. That man was President George Q. Cannon, First Counselor to President Woodruff in the First Presidency. The request caught President Cannon off guard, for he had supposed that President Woodruff would take the lead in this historic moment. Just a few minutes earlier, Orson F. Whitney, a Salt Lake City bishop, had read the Manifesto, the momentous document (known today as Official Declaration 1) in which President Woodruff declared his intention to submit to laws prohibiting plural marriage. President Woodruff had released the document to the press two weeks earlier, without comment. President Cannon stared out into a sea of pensive and eager people, with one thing on their minds.
“I felt to shrink very much from it,” President Cannon wrote, speaking of the request to speak. “I think I never was called upon to do a thing that seemed more difficult than this.”
The Saints had practiced plural marriage for half a century. Women and men had anguished over the decision to enter a principle that was alien to their religious upbringings and inclinations. They had suffered personal and collective isolation, harassment, and imprisonment for the principle. But they had also accepted plural marriage as God’s command to the Church. They believed the practice refined their souls and defined their peculiarity in the eyes of the world. What would define them now? President Cannon surely knew that wholesale changes in self-definition would not be easily made. The anguish of exiting plural marriage would rival the challenge of entering into it.
After Bishop Whitney read the document, the conference had voted with uplifted hand to sustain it as “authoritative and binding” upon the Church. Most voted in the affirmative, but some kept their hands in their laps, unready to accept the Manifesto as the will of God. From the stand, Church leaders looking out on the audience saw husbands and wives weeping, anxious and uncertain, not knowing what the Manifesto meant for them going forward.
President Cannon raised his hand in support of the Manifesto along with most others in the crowd. But the weight of unifying a divided audience on what he called this “exceedingly delicate subject” seemed almost too much to bear. The message could go in a thousand different ways. As he stood and walked to the podium, his mind raced. “There was nothing in my mind that seemed clear to me to say upon this subject,” he wrote of that moment. “I arose with my mind a blank.”" (The Messenger and the Manifesto Official Declaration 1 Jed Woodworth)
"In the “Excerpts from Three Addresses by President Wilford Woodruff regarding the Manifesto” (at the end of Official Declaration 1), what reasons did the prophet give for the Lord ending the practice of plural marriage? What does this teach you about God’s work?
For more information about the historical background of Official Declaration 1, see Saints, 2:602–15; “The Messenger and the Manifesto,” in Revelations in Context, 323–31; Topics and Questions, “Plural Marriage and Families in Early Utah,” Gospel Library.
Wilford Woodruff, by H. E. Peterson"
The reasons the prophet gave for the Lord ending the practice of plural marriage are:
- the laws of the nation against it
- the opposition of sixty millions of people
- the possible consequences of continuing its practice: 1) cost of the confiscation and loss of all the Temples; 2) the stopping of all the ordinances in the temple, both for the living and the dead; 3) the possible imprisonment of the First Presidency and Twelve and the heads of families in the Church; and 3) the possible confiscation of personal property of the people
As I ponder on what does this teach me, the words of The Articles of Faith #12 came to mind: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honoring, and sustaining the law." The work of the Lord moves forward as it abides the law of the land. God, Himself, honors the law of the land and will not give a commandment or insist on asking His people to obey His commandment that is against the law of the land.
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